Amir-

  I have been struggling to find the words with which to describe to you the utter desotion of the wretched pce in which my Dastena has found itself. The Seigharthan ambassador, it seems, has always been quite careful to describe only the oasis surrounding the Fraylough when presenting to the court, and not Odhran’s Reach itself. How best to say it? Withered trees reach skyward as though begging the suns to cease their relentless glow and make way for rains that will no more quench the thirst of what few creatures survive here than bring the twisted boughs back into bloom. Three days since we crossed the border and even still I have not grown used to the sheer emptiness of it all.

  In your st letter you asked after the steel carriage that carries us to my engagement, and though I am no engineer nor student of artifice, I will endeavor to describe it to you (though, brother, you could yourself simply take to the walls of Malokat and see them trundling about yourself if you were not so absorbed in the petty squabbling of the court). Despite your reclusion inside the pace, you must be familiar with the steam driven trams which ttice Thandar, great metal things that move on tracks between stations. The carriage we departed Malokat in is much the same, dragged along by a great furnace at its prow with compartments linked behind it, one with sleeping bunks for my Dastena and the carriage crew, one for storage and cooking, my own, which I’ve been sharing with my second, and a small stable for the horses during their rest shifts. The storage car, off one side, has a roost for the pigeons.

  The marvel of these new carriages though, Amir, is not their engines, as, like I said, those can be found in every corner of Thandar, but their tracks. They do not rely on steel beams id carefully in advance, but y down their own, in a manner of speaking, before the same tracks are then pulled up behind the wheels to be used once again, allowing the driver to push the carriage ever onward into the wastend in which we now travel.

  I will admit, Seighart is still some days away from us and yet I find myself filled with the strangest mixture of apprehension and excitement. I’ve never before left the borders of Thandar. I know what you will say, brother, that none of us has, with the exception, perhaps, of the Dané, but still I find myself thinking both of home and of what new sights await us when we arrive at the Fraylough. I think of my betrothed.

  The images borne to the court by the ambassador paint an exquisite picture, of course. Aoife Thomond is, by all accounts, the very picture of Seigharthan splendor, and yet I still find myself apprehensive. Do not think me hesitant at the betrothal itself, Amir, I understand my duty and as the Dané commands I will do, and as punishments for my shame go, marriage to a Western beauty seems far kinder than I deserve. Instead I fear that I, brother, will be found inadequate, and as I have been bidden to be hers, she has been to be mine. I wish not be a punishment.

  Speaking of the Dané, please wish her well from me, though I know she may not wish to hear it. As father is oft wont to say, family is of sacred importance, and those words are true now more than ever. I know you understand my thoughts on the matter, but I must impress that you not bme her for my exile to the Reach. My failings are my own, and these are the least of consequences. Badr would ugh, I think, to hear that all his death has wrought is a marriage for his unweddable sister. Leave some flowers for him, Amir, the sort he always kept by his windows. I think he would like that. Perhaps take your own betrothed to pick them; the royal gardens are, if my short time away has not yet eroded my memory, absolutely lovely this time of year.

  Keep me appraised of Shivan movements at the border. I know I am in no pce to aid the war in my absence, but knowing my people are at risk has set my mind ill at ease.

  As ever,--

  “Samira,” Purred a voice from just over her shoulder, calloused hands draping about her shoulders and causing her to smear the ink of her signature. “Have you finished yet with your scribbling? I’ve ordered the rest of the Dastena break for dinner and that leaves us with, what, an hour to ourselves? I suspect we could-”

  Samira stood abruptly, knocking the arms of the shorter woman from her and whirled around. Rani Bansal was a stout woman, nearly a full head shorter than her but as muscur as the horses that fnked the carriage. She stared up at Samira with hazel eyes that tried, and failed, to disguise their hurt. Reaching a hand for Samira’s, she took a small step forward, which Samira mirrored with a step back.

  “Rani, you…”

  “I?” She defiantly glowered. Standing there in her undershirt, her dark skin showed where the ces had been loosened. Teeming with expectation and disappointment both, Rani was beautiful. Samira felt the words dry in her mouth. Instead, she looked out the window toward the freshly lit campfires the carriage crew had set. They’d be packing up to keep moving soon, the steel carriage a beast of burden that did not need a night’s rest, only a changing of drivers.

  Rani stepped closer once again, and Samira found herself pinned between the small writing desk that she’d insisted be installed in her compartment and the woman with whom she’d spent the st several years fostering a retionship with.

  “I’ve never known you to be a coward, Sam,” She spoke, a dangerous undertone to the jab, “So ‘I’ what? Aren’t you going to speak your mind? You were so eager to denigrate yourself before the court, so why not to me? ‘I’ what?” Another step closer, Rani pnted her hands onto the hammered steel surface of the desk to either side of Samira’s waist. She’d always had a way of seeming so much rger than her stature betrayed.

  “You… we…” The words felt like sand, “I thought we had an understanding about this, Rani. About us. The betrothal-”

  “Yes!” Rani snapped, anger flickering behind those beautiful eyes, now just inches from Samira’s, “The betrothal! A political affair, nothing more, you said. An appeasement for the Dané, to get you out of her beautiful perfect kingdom, a means of assigning bme for events out of your control, nothing more. The betrothal, meant to ship the woman I love off to this sunscorched nowhere,” Those same worn hands, more accustomed to holding a sword than a lover, found themselves on Samira’s cheeks. “The betrothal that means nothing to me, or to you.”

  Samira couldn’t bring herself to meet Rani’s gaze.

  “It does not mean nothing to me, Rani.” She croaked. “I made an oath to-“

  Rani’s gre interrupted her yet again. “An oath to marry a woman on the other side of the continent sight unseen, yes. I am aware, despite my efforts to forget.”

  Samira bristled. “Enough, Rani. Consider that an order from your Daamaret. I made an oath to marry Princess Aoife Thomond, a woman whose honor I will not besmirch further by adding unfaithfulness to the list of her fiance's sins.”

  Rani stilled, trailing rough fingertips down Samira’s cheeks, then letting her hands, agonizingly, drop to her sides. Her voice wavered, only enough that someone who knew her would know the sadness her face concealed. Despite how badly Samira wished in that moment that it weren’t so, she was one such someone. When Rani spoke again, her voice was no longer fierce and challenging, the fire in her eyes simmering to coals. “There really is no talking you out of this then, is there? You never were content with half measures.”

  “Rani…” Samira began, but trailed off, comforting words feeling coarse and false on her tongue.

  Rani, her rock these past years, her sole source of comfort in the months since she’d lost Badr, stared at her for a long moment, then looked towards the door. Rani took a single small hesitant step backward.

  “Apologies for the miscommunication, Daamaret. It won’t happen again.” She looked towards Samira one st time, expression difficult to read. “The Dastena will be ready to move again in an hour, upon your command.”

  “Rani-” Samira cut herself off, choking on the name of her second, “Saamet Bansal,” She corrected, “I appreciate your vigince in attending to your duties.”

  Rani squared her shoulders and opened the door. “Have a restful evening, Daamaret.” She murmured, and then she was gone, leaving Samira alone, still leaned against her desk in the suddenly much too rge compartment.

  Her Dastena, the 25 soldiers assigned as her personal detail, was smaller than the ones she had commanded against the armies of Shiv prior to her exile to Odhran’s Reach. The hum of voices, the sleepy tones of the day’s guard rotation mixed with the freshly woken grumbles of the evening shift, drifted through the shuttered windows of Samira’s carriage compartment. While the carriage did not need to stop to rest, the guards and horses accompanying it did. The evening meal coincided with the changing of the guard, horses sore from a day spent trudging through the wastend corralled into the back compartment of the carriage, and the guards taking over the bunks abandoned by their nocturnal peers.

  The carriage’s cook would be by in a moment with her evening meal, Samira knew, but the knot in her stomach was unlikely to let her eat. She turned back to her desk, eying the smeared letter. She would have to pen a new one; Amir would never let her hear the end of it if she sent him a letter in that condition. It communicated disrespect, a ck of familial affection, or any number of simir such critiques. Samira loved Amir as much as anyone loves their second favorite sibling, but his fixation on things that had always, to her, seemed so unimportant had occasionally left them at odds. She wished he was here.

  More than that, she wished Badr was here as she creaked out orders for the caravan to resume. Badr, who would’ve given the command for her. Badr, who would’ve comforted her as she cried, ying there on the somewhat too narrow bed in her compartment, rocked ever so slightly by the rumbling of the tracks beneath the carriage. Badr, who would know exactly the words to say to make Rani understand, to make all of this hurt less.

  But Badr was dead.

  Instead, Samira tossed and turned under the uncomfortably warm sheets, longing for her brother, her second, anyone, and receiving nothing but the rumble of the carriage, and the distant cry of carrion birds.

  The fore of the carriage had a bell affixed just above the driver’s compartment. It was a holdover from the original design of the steel carriage, intended to inform prospective passengers at the upcoming stop of the carriage’s approach. In the case of this particur carriage, it did, in some contexts, serve that purpose. However, there was a secondary use for such an item on a military transport.

  “Monster! To arms!” The head of watch was muffled by the steel walls of the carriage, but the ringing of the bell pulled Samira from her fitful slumber all the same. She y there groggily for a moment before the words actually sunk in and she threw herself from the bed, pulling her sword from where it y leant against the desk, drawing it from its scabbard in the same motion. There wasn’t time for armor, so she flung open the door to her compartment and hopped, half dressed, down onto the dry, hard packed soil.

  A Dastena in motion, as Thandarans would tell you, is ordered chaos incarnate. A flurry of motion well coordinated through months of drills done with the same group of soldiers again and again until each knows their pce like one of the metal rods in the engine of the carriage. While the armies of Shiv prided themselves on each soldier filling a repceable role, each trained to fit into any given formation without disrupting it, each member of a Dastena was an integral part of its function. Badr had always cimed that this left the Thandaran military unmatched in terms of cohesion and unity. Amir had called it foolish to rely over much so on any particur soldier. Amir hadn’t ever served at the front, though, his mandatory service having been spent running patrols of the peaceful Northeast coastline, and Samira had never been fond of listening to what he had to say anyway.

  Whatever had caused the head of watch such arm must’ve been on the port side of the carriage, the opposite to the side Samira had exited on. The carriage was still slowing to a stop, and Samira rushed with the rest of the freshly awoken members of the Dastena to the aft of the carriage to circle around it.

  “Status?” She barked over the din, voice still creaky with sleep. The chatter of soldiers was audible, but even as she rounded the carriage she still couldn’t hear any sound of combat.

  Saamet Shivali Divan, her third, a tall nky man, stood at the front of the assembled soldiers, and he looked quickly over his shoulder towards Samira before looking back out at the darkness of the Reach. “Daamaret! Some… thing, a monster, it’s just… look!”

  Samira pushed her way through the crowd. The carriage had a pair of oil mps at the fore, constructed to project light forward to illuminate the path of the carriage at night, and had smaller such mps along its length to light the path of the soldiers and horses on foot, but otherwise the night was nearly pitch bck. The sky over the Reach was shrouded by rainless clouds this evening, and the moon would give no glow obscured as it was. As she arrived next to the Saamet, she finally got a glimpse of what had caused her soldiers such arm. There, at the edge of the light of the carriage, maybe 30 or 40 feet away, stood a… something was the correct term.

  The thing shifted in the darkness in such a way that Samira couldn’t quite see the edges of it, and as the light from the mps flickered, it shifted forwards, and then back again as they fred back to full brightness. It had limbs that stretched longer than seemed right for any creature of its size to have, and it moved its bance between them as it probed the edges of the light. Long spindly… arms? Dug into the dirt as it lurked at the edge of the shadows. Samira would liken it more to an insect than a person with its odd proportions, but it still seemed to be standing upright, based on what few bits of it she could make out.

  The Saamet bounced from foot to foot, sword warily held ready. “It swiped at the head of the watch, but when it missed it’s just been standing there, like it won’t come any closer.” He murmured, eyeing the creature again.

  The head of watch for the evening shift, a short quiet man, gnced towards Samira with haunted eyes, before his gaze went back to the dark. “It’s wrong, whatever it is.” He muttered. “Tried to get cws in me, but it can’t go in the light. Been following us at a distance for a while, but I thought it was some other critter. Thought it was harmless.”

  Odhran’s Reach had a reputation in Thandar as a wastend, and a wastend it was. In the days since the caravan had crossed from Thandaran nds into Seigharthan territory, they had yet to encounter a living thing besides the small sorts of animals that are able to subsist on the dried out pnts that managed to survive with the ck of rain. It was as though the soil itself was anathema to life, choking the roots of anything that tried to grow. It should’ve been impossible for anything the size of whatever the thing was to be out here.

  Samira pushed her way back through the crowd, and pulled one of the smaller oil mps from its hook, holding it aloft while keeping her sword in her other hand. “Keep a distance! We don’t know what this thing is and what it’s capable of.” She ordered, looking over the Dastena. They were good soldiers, most of whom she had had under her command during her campaign in the South, all of whom now exiled along with her to this godsforsaken pce. “No unnecessary risks. Am I understood?”

  An uneasy hum of assent went through her Dastena, and they moved aside so she could stand beside the Saamet once more. Raising the mp, she spoke, louder this time, “Are you capable of speech? You attacked my watchmaster and I demand an expnation. We are representatives of the Charan Dynasty of Thandar and will be treated as such. Yield or we will respond with force.” Samira kept her voice level despite her own disquiet, and began stepping forwards, slowly.

  As she moved, and the bubble of light pooling out from the carriage crept closer to the creature, it matched her steps backward, retreating from the oil mp’s glow. Irritated, she abruptly thrust the ntern forward, and finally caught sight of the thing’s face. A twisted mockery of a human visage, features stretched uncannily, ears long and pointed, a mouth slightly agape as though astonished at the sight before it that was full of teeth that reminded Samira of a predatory fish. The eyes caught the light and shone like a cat’s, before the face contorted with agony and it jerked away from her and back out of clear sight.

  A long, rattling hiss, broken with what sounded to Samira like gibberish, emanated from the creature, but lower than where its mouth had been, as though the sound were coming directly from its lungs in a crude mockery of speech. Samira took an instinctive half step back in arm, and another when, as the sound tapered out, a chorus of them began to rise from the darkness farther from the carriage, first one, then several, then a dozen. Rattling not-words hung over the caravan coming from nearly every direction.

  The soldiers were spurred to motion again from where they had been tensely watching Samira, nervously moving to form a semicircle facing out into the dark with their backs to the carriage.

  “Gods…” The head of watch’s voice was coarse, and afraid. He was a veteran of the battle that had taken Badr from her, Samira remembered, and even then she had not seen him as shaken as this. “Demons, Daamaret! The Reach… the rumors say it is haunted by foul creatures not of Eidei.”

  Samira kept her eyes on the shadows, watching for more shifting, unnatural limbs. “Watch for others. If we are surrounded, we must keep the carriage safe, without it we’ll be stranded here.” She commanded coolly, “What of these rumors?” She directed to the head of watch.

  The short man kept his bde held outward, slowly turning as though unsure of where to point it. “Soldiers who have been patrolling the Western border, Daamaret. They say the merchants that come from Seighart tell stories about otherworldly creatures, demons, who lurk in the wastes. The King- Ah, but such stories besmirch the good name of the royal family, Daamaret. I shouldn’t speak of the family you marry into in such a way.” He said.

  Samira suppressed a grimace. “Speak true to me, soldier. What do they say?” She snapped, watching the creature close enough to see begin to pace from side to side like an animal waiting for an opening.

  The head of watch swallowed heavily, and looked towards Samira’s third, who nodded. Something for her to worry about ter, if her own soldiers were unable to trust her enough to speak their minds. She’d have to earn their trust again, she supposed; justified, but it hurt all the same.

  “King Thomond,” He started, “The rumors among the common folk say that he’s made a deal with a demon. For power, to maintain the oasis of the Fraylough. The same sort that bedevils us now, that hunts travelers through the Reach.” The soldier paused, considering his wording carefully. “Daamaret, you must take care in the court of Drachlás. Not all of its members are human, much as they might seem it. I know not if it is all truth, Ma’am, but I feel it in my bones. Something is very wrong in Seighart.”

  There had been, of course, no mention of any such demons in any of the meetings Samira had sat in on between the Dané and the Seigharthan ambassador. He was a small round man, the ambassador, with a warm ugh. That was what she remembered most clearly at least. The st she had seen of him had been years ago, before the war with Shiv had started. She had spent most of her time since at the front, forming a bulwark against which the Shivan forces had thrown themselves. Demons were not something shared in polite company, that much she understood about the politicking of the court, but even so it seemed something that would’ve been worth mentioning. Then again, perhaps it had been mentioned, and the Dané chose not to tell her. Her mother was not usually so spiteful, but it would be, again, justified. Samira only wished such an omission hadn’t put her Dastena in as much danger as herself.

  Samira scowled, “It would seem the rumors are, at least in part, true. What do we call these,” She gestured broadly at their perimeter, “If not demons. What threat do we now face if not an unnatural one.” She looked again at the creature, who was now scratching at the ground with its cws. It hooked them deep into the dry dirt then pulled up a messy chunk of it, before making a noise that she could swear almost sounded like a groan of disappointment. Checking if the light just affected the surface, perhaps. They mustn't be too intelligent, then, Samira surmised, though if they figured out a way to dig underneath the carriage…

  “We keep moving,” Samira commanded, “Light the extra mps and get the torches from the storage compartment. Evening shift will maintain a lighted perimeter around the caravan, no one gets close to the shadows.” She locked eyes with her third, the Saamet already gesturing to direct soldiers to their positions. “Tell the driver to resume, half speed until I give the order. If these things are pnning to surround us, we’re not staying in one pce long enough for them to find a way around the mps.”

  She, reluctantly, lowered her sword. “Day shift can sleep once we figure out if these things are going to attack or not. Stay ready, but you don’t have to maintain the perimeter. Rest on your feet.” She barked, heading back for her compartment to retrieve her armor and the scabbard for her sword. It was going to be a long night.